By Mark Anderson / Stop the Presses News & Commentary
Also see http://thetruthhound.com (Scroll down a few paragraphs for the UK Column News You Tube video that includes a report on this conference and related matters)
CHICAGO – The “Disruptive Forces Changing Cities,” program, conducted by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs Sept. 15, was a textbook case of an elite organization pursuing a tightly planned, dictatorial society—while sounding like it’s seeking a democratic, promising vision of fairness and prosperity for all.
It’s all being spearheaded in accordance with the growing “global cities” scheme. According to several CCGA-aligned think tanks, journalists and others supporting the Global Parliament of Mayors and similar groupings, this ideological movement challenges the authority of the nations the cities inhabit, in order to usurp some of the key powers delegated to national governments by their charters and constitutions.
Since this movement chisels away at the constitutional foundations of nations, it risks undermining them in a way that would redraw the lines of governance, in a manner that’s highly unpredictable, and potentially radical and unlawful. The policy areas over which cities want to assume much more influence (and, ultimately, exert control) include battling climate change, regulating immigration in order to increase it while providing sanctuary cities, along with sparking job growth and several other things—even including the seemingly improbable realm of foreign policy, where you’d think mayors would not tread.
The CCGA’s latest program Sept. 15, held on-the-record at the organization’s conference center in the Prudential Building on Randolph Street, was a continuation of many of the themes covered in early June 2016 and June 2017 at the CCGA’s annual all-day Forum on Global Cities. The keynote speaker Sept. 15 was Amy Liu, who’s Vice President and Director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Washington D.C.’s Brookings Institution. (see directly below to view more news about this Chicago forum, among other topics, on the Sept. 21 UK Column News broadcast, in association with this Stop the Presses site).
She’s considered “a national expert on cities and metropolitan areas adept at translating research and insights into action on the ground. As director of Brookings Metro, which Liu co-founded in 1996, she pioneered the program’s signature approach to policy and practice, which uses rigorous research to inform strategies for economic growth and opportunity,” a CCGA representative said while introducing Liu in Chicago.
Prior to her Brookings work, Liu was Special Assistant to [U.S. Housing and Urban Development] Secretary Henry Cisneros and staffed the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs. She holds a Northwestern University degree in social policy and urban studies.
Her remarks were promoted via the CCGA website with statements like, “Cities are increasingly driving the global economy” but “numerous disruptive forces . . . threaten to deepen inequality and economic exclusion, unless cities adapt and evolve.”
And while Liu spoke of the choices that municipal leaders will need to make, in order to give their workforces access to basic things like skills, (and to “foster innovation and entrepreneurship,” while “deepening regional connections”) the key to understanding her message is discerning what she and the CCGA mean by “global forces of disruption.”
To address such matters, Liu spoke solo and then collaborated with CCGA moderator Niamh King, who, prior to joining the CCGA, worked for the European Commission and the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, among several other posts.
Liu began her talk by saying she wants cities to be “vibrant” places to work and live, but due to America’s current national discourse under President Trump, “we are turning our backs on climate change, on the poor and the working class” while also betraying “our values as a nation of immigrants.” Moreover, “people of all races and religions” are being neglected under this national discourse.
“So rather than take us backwards, the nation needs our cities to move us forward,” Liu carefully stated, presenting a thinly-veiled claim that the nation-state, especially a more nationalist one, represents a barrier to what internationalist-oriented cities can do.
Thus, the world’s cities, in essence, need to run their nations, she implied. Accordingly, she called for a future that’s “hyper-global, more digital, more urban, more multi-racial and multi-ethnic.”
But her concern is that “these very same forces of progress can also be great sources of division.” Technology, for example, creates opportunities for some “but destroys it for others,” favoring the highly-skilled while abandoning those who cannot keep pace.
To combat such disparities, Liu stressed that local leaders need to build “inclusive” local and regional economies “that radically adapt to disruption and future-proof our cities.” Citing her Brookings work, she said cities therefore should pursue three goals: “Growth, prosperity and inclusion.”
That, she added, means “quality growth of good jobs” to seek a better level of prosperity, but in order to achieve the inclusion part, economic and social benefits, especially in terms of better incomes, must accrue to all members of the community, “closing disparities by race and by place.”
She also said that 63 U.S. metro areas out of 100 experienced economic growth and job hikes between 2010 and 2015, according to Brookings research. But several cities only saw growth in lesser-quality jobs, while only eight made significant economic progress in inclusion “for whites and people of color.”
Liu also stressed, “The nation’s economic growth is not felt by most people . . . as a whole the bottom 50% of income-earners, the middle class, the working class, the poor, have made no ground. So the bulk of the nation’s income gains have accrued to the top earners.” From this, she concluded that it’s up to the cities to bridge these gaps and solve the problems.
Liu then cited “historic policies and attitudes” that she feels have “held us back” in tackling such inequities. Accordingly, at this point, she delved into “the disruptive forces facing cities” and “how city leaders can adapt to disruption.”
DOUBLE-SPEAK DETECTED
Ironically, Liu spoke of these disruptive forces, which are mainly macroeconomic in nature, as if they’re akin to the four horsemen of the apocalypse—“globalization, urbanization, technology and demographic change,” which, she warned, are “upending existing systems.”
She went on to say that while globalization has supposedly slowed down, free trade is going strong, accounting “for 40% of world economic value.”
Trade, she deduced from this, has “tremendous economic value” because firms that export their wares hire more people and pay better wages than non-exporting firms, yet, while downplaying the immense damage free trade has wrought—lest groupings like Brookings and the CCGA lose the narrative in their constant support for more free-trade treaties—she admitted that U.S. voters in the last election made it clear that globalization has left many without jobs for extended time periods.
Showing a color-coded map, she also said that “federal adjustment assistance” has been extended to more than two million Americans in the past two decades—those whose jobs were terminated “due to trade,” with “70% of such workers living in large and small metropolitan areas.” The “trade pain was most felt in the industrial communities in the Midwest and the South,” she also conceded.
BENDING PEOPLE TO THE SYSTEM, NOT VICE VERSA
But the crux of the matter shone through when she stated; “I would say that the problem isn’t so much globalization, but the failure of our public policies to help people and to help communities adjust to the new world order.”
At any rate, Liu continued, “The question is, have we learned our lesson, as we face a bigger disruption called the digital revolution?”
This revolution is another thing that she welcomed on the one hand, and warned about on the other, using what’s best described as a slick form of Orwellian doublespeak that this writer calls “Globalese.”
As this writer deciphers such “globalese,” we could translate her statements to mean that, instead of our “leaders” creating a system that answers to humans, the CCGA and similar organizations want to bend humans to their internationalist system, behind a façade of egalitarian rhetoric that stresses an “inclusiveness” which can never be achieved under the dominant central-banking paradigm that prevents nations from issuing their own money, interest-free, as a sovereign act without being beholden to the debt system of the world banking fraternity.
Such linguistic dualism is done to mask the CCGA-led movement to undercut nation states in favor of world government, under the guise of a phony “local control” mantra. If this weren’t the case, these one-worlders wouldn’t be so historically and still-deeply dismissive of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which does reserve certain powers to the states and the people, apart from the powers that are constitutionally delegated to the national government.
In other words, if the CCGA and its partner groups really want genuine localized control for the common good, why are they by and large hostile to the established power-sharing federalism under the U.S. Constitution? Instead, they look to the Global Parliament of Mayors, which just met in Norway.
Indeed, the glaring contradiction here is that the very disrupters cited by Liu and those of her ilk in the CCGA, Brookings and related globalist outfits—which help comprise a private-government network fueled mainly by central banks, think tanks and big media—are heavily promoted by these same groups, with little or no dissent.
And the world’s cities, as she explained with a delicacy than can only be decrypted through a careful perusal of her words and concepts, are to be enlisted as the new vanguard to adapt cities and nations to the demands of the new world order—rather than pulling back from globalization and the free-trade policies that have largely caused the economic and social damage that Liu claims to abhor.
Furthermore, when it comes to urbanization, people are leaving rural life, she said.
“In 2016, 86% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas; that’s up 6% from 2010, while rural areas continue to shrink . . . so, yes, urbanization itself creates winners and losers”—with skills and talent becoming more clustered in certain areas. But poverty is also clustering, since there are major economic disparities between and even within cities.
RACIAL MATTERS
“We’re transitioning to a time when there will be no racial and ethnic group that is a majority,” she went on to say, “creating huge discomfort for some,” which, she said, could cause “a cultural war in a nation that erupted in violence in Charlottesville.” Here she totally missed the mark, since the Marxist agitators in Virginia, who preach the same racial-justice and inclusive narrative that Liu preaches, were the primary troublemakers, not the largely white middle class that’s been dispossessed by free trade and the debt-based money system, among other factors.
While Liu said blacks and immigrants “face a unique experience” in terms of confronting economic discrimination, she did say, however, that a new narrative is needed to admit that whites also face deep economic hardships, not just minorities. To fail in this undertaking, she said, “would feed a cultural divide that will make difficult the reforms we need to aid the poor and the working class.”
And the technology factor—the robotics, automation, big data, mobile apps and the “internet of things” enveloping the world—is bringing about tremendous strides but with it come additional tough challenges, not the least of which is automation displacing human beings in production.
“If left unmanaged,” she said, such hi-tech developments “may have a more devastating effect on workers and industries than did trade.”
IT’S THE MONEY . . .
When asked by this writer about monetary policy, Liu said something like Universal Basic Income “might water down the benefits of food stamps and other assistance” for struggling families. And she stated that supplemental income, of whatever form, “doesn’t solve the dignity of work. People just want to have productive time and feel valued, and so UBI alone is not sufficient.” She instead suggested wage insurance, doubling tax credits, tapping into retirement funds early etc.
Here, too, Liu is evidently unaware that inherent flaws in the money system ensure that, in each production cycle, wages and salaries are always surpassed, in velocity and quantity, by price structures and debts.
As this writer has learned, insightful “economic democracy” advocates, starting with late Scotsman Clifford Hugh Douglas, and also including the late American academic Gorham Munson, former NASA official Richard Cook, Canadian social credit-distributism author Oliver Heydorn and Albertan “social credit” expert Wallace Klinck, all have exhaustively outlined the case for supplemental income in the form of a regular cash dividend (among other adjustments) that’s paid directly to the population—a dividend that isn’t tied to work.
That way, existing employment income can be supplemented, to enable people to exert enough demand for products and services—in order to bridge this built-in shortfall in purchasing power and make the economy function properly in a balanced production-consumption fashion. This would also enable people to retire credit cards and stop taking out endless loans, which results in the poverty that Liu says she’s so concerned about.
BOOST MAYORAL POWER?
“You talked about leaders of cities. In our world of global cities . . . mayors are the ‘rock stars’ now. It used to be central bankers but now it is mayors,” Ms. King, the CCGA’s moderator said to Liu, as the Sept. 15 program neared conclusion.
So, in further showing that the internationalist idea of empowering cities means more than meets the eye, King also said to Liu: “At the beginning of your talk, you talked about climate change. We’re of the view that cities have answers that federal governments don’t have.”
“There’s been so much attention on the power of mayors, recently, and how mayors need to step out now,” Liu replied. “Mayors are going to have to step up,” she said, to enact climate change policies and on “protecting immigrants.” She did not specify whether that means protecting illegal immigrants, but that was the implication, since making the legal-illegal distinction is a function of the nation state that global mayors evidently seek to sidestep.